Judy WoodruffIn a PBS NewsHour broadcast discussion segment airing 11/10/15 (“Has Exxon Mobil mislead the public about its climate change research?“) Judy Woodruff interviewed New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman about his efforts to subpoena ExxonMobil documents. These are supposed to prove whether the company misled its own investors and the public on what it knew and when it knew it about the purported catastrophic human-induced global warming rhat has been on “pause” for almost 18 years.
Woodruff, noting the situation was brought to light “by PBS’s Frontline in collaboration with Inside Climate News,” said Exxon’s response to the reports was that they contained “deliberately cherry-picked statements attributed to various ExxonMobil employees,” and that this involved “statements taken completely out of context.” A.G. Schneiderman’s reaction to that latter point was as follows (bold emphasis mine):
ERIC SCHNEIDERMAN: Well, then they should welcome this investigation, because, unlike journalists, my staff is going to get to read all of the documents in context, and they will have an opportunity to explain the context of the statements and whether there are contradictions or not.
OK: to render an objective fair judgment on any given situation, people need to see the full context of it. But in the case of the PBS NewsHour, the producers have ignored basically half of the context of global warming for almost twenty years.
My second-ever online piece, “The lack of climate skeptics on PBS’s ‘Newshour’“, appeared here at American Thinker on December 29, 2009. Within it, I detailed a particular much repeated talking point on excessive “fair media balance” given to skeptic climate scientists, a situation demonstratively not happening at all. I followed up in July 2010 with my “The Left and Its Talking Points” piece, in which I quantified at that time the bias of the NewsHour on the global warming issue. Via a lengthy look through all of their online broadcast archives going back to 1996, which included web-only pages having direct ties to particular global warming broadcast segments, I found that among 200+ specific discussions of the topic and major references to global warming, only three on-air segments had any mention of basic skeptic science points.
The NewsHour has been quite busy ever since that time on the topic. I’ve constantly updated my ongoing computer file of this bias, copying their page links and key words from their discussions anytime they bring it up. By my count, this Eric Schneiderman segment is number #534. With just an increase, since I last wrote, of two instances where at least some semblance of skeptic science climate assessment points was offered to counterbalance assertions made about the certainty of catastrophic global warming, their bias now stands at a ratio of approximately 529:5. I say “approximately” because I’ve probably missed some of the NewsHour’s increasing online-only blog material on the topic.
Assuming the staff of the New York Attorney General’s office does examine all of the material surrounding the PBS Frontline / Inside Climate News in context and finds that both not only took material out of context while also having a history of bias against skeptics (for example, Frontline’s 2012 “Climate of Doubt” program, which I detailed, shouldn’ here), shouldn’t ttorney General Schneiderman instead launch an investigation into Frontline and Inside Climate News?
